From The “Don’t They Have Better Things To Do” File

I tend to take Wikipedia entries with at least a grain of salt, particularly those involving anything remotely controversial. Garbage in, garbage out is just as functional in the case of anonymous internet postings as in any other endeavor.

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the “world’s largest encyclopedia,” The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan’s chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan’s campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan’s campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

With no pun intended, that’s pretty bush-league.

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This entry was posted on January 29, 2006 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Pith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Note that nothing is ever truely ‘deleted’ from Wikipedia. All revisions of the article are accessible by clicking on the ‘history’ tab and usually when someone does something like this the article is quickly reverted to an earlier edition.

In the old days of the Internet (many, many moons ago, my son–’round about, say, 1999), vanity searches ruled the Internet (that’s how I ultimately discovered InstaPundit, and ultimately, the then-budding Blogosphere, back in 2001, just before 9/11). …

Does anyone have any data, especially more than anecdotal data, on Wikipedia actually leaning in any direction politically? I mean, I know how it’s “supposed” to work…but what in life ever works out the way it’s supposed to?
Well, if anyone does have any such data, please email me and let me know.